Thanks to @[email protected] for the links!
Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior
Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
I think that we are all speaking without being able to read the paper (and in my case, I know I wouldn’t understand it), so I think dismissing it outright without knowing how they are defining things or measuring them is not really the best course here.
I would suggest that Caltech studies don’t tend to be poorly-done.
There is literally nothing the paper could say and no evidence they could provide to make the assertion in the title anything less than laughable.
There are hundreds of systems in your brain that are actively processing many, many orders of magnitude more than ten bits of information per second all the time. We can literally watch them do so.
It’s possible the headline is a lie by someone who doesn’t understand the research. It’s not remotely within the realm of plausibility that it resembles reality in any way.
That is quite the claim from someone who has apparently not even read the abstract of the paper. I pasted it in the thread.
It doesn’t matter what it says.
A word is more than 10 bits on its own.
You know, dismissing a paper without even taking a minute to read the abstract and basing everything on a headline to claim it’s all nonsense is not a good look. I’m just saying.
The point is that it’s literally impossible for the headline to be anything but a lie.
I don’t need to dig further into a headline that claims cell towers cause cancer because of deadly cell signal radiation, and that’s far less deluded than this headline is.
The core concept is entirely incompatible with even a basic understanding of information theory or how the brain works.
(But I did read the abstract, not knowing it’s the abstract because it’s such nonsensical babble. It makes it even worse.)
Again, refusing to even read the abstract when it has been provided for you because you’ve already decided the science is wrong without evaluating anything but a short headline is not a good look.
In fact, it is the sort of thing that people who claim cell towers cause cancer are famous for doing themselves.
The headline is completely incompatible with multiple large bodies of scientific evidence. It’s the equivalent of claiming gravity doesn’t exist. Dismissing obvious nonsense is a necessary part of filtering the huge amount of information available.
But I did read the abstract and it makes the headline look reasonable by comparison.
I don’t suppose it would be worth asking if your professional field was neurology…